During my talk yesterday at Devoxx, my laptop died about halfway through. Fortunately for me, Toni Epple stepped in and loaned me his laptop to finish up the presentation and even had a demo ready for me! Toni and I met the day before at the speakers’ dinner where we talked about Quercus and the new NetBeans PHP support. I hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet, so at the dinner I couldn’t say whether they worked together or not. The day of the talk, Toni stopped by the Caucho booth to try to get Netbeans to deploy WordPress to Quercus and we got it working quite easily on his laptop. He let me use that same laptop and the deployed WordPress as a demo when my machine died. What luck!

This just in… in the middle of writing this blog entry, one of the audience members from yesterday came to talk to me at the booth and told me that the same thing happened to another presenter at a BOF later in the day! I was using my laptop with Windows, then I tried another Windows machine which didn’t work, and finally Toni’s Mac saved me. In the BOF, there were again two Windows laptops that failed then a Mac saved the day again. I’m pretty sure what my replacement machine should be now…

Watch this blog for my presentation and either a description or a screencast next week of the demo I was planning to do. It’s actually a nice little example of how to profile and optimize a PHP app with a Java profiler. It will use our built-in Resin profiler that I modified last week to have a special Quercus mode.

Thanks once again to Toni for his help and check out his blog post about getting the NetBeans PHP and Quercus to work together. Thanks also to all the other attendees for coming and for their patience!

We’ve got a full schedule here at Caucho, with a huge number of events coming up for 2009. I’ll announce everything as it comes along, but just to mention a couple that are coming up soon:

• Devoxx - Devoxx is less than a week away! I’ll be presenting Quercus and we’ll have a booth on the expo floor where I and other Caucho team members will be available to answer your questions about Resin, Quercus, BAM, Hessian, and even sales/business questions. If you’re at Devoxx, stop on by the booth for info and the chance to win some prizes!
• Caucho Admin Training - We had a great time in October with the first training session. So good, that we decided to book a full schedule for 2009! The next session is exactly two months from now on February 4, so start making plans to attend. During the last session we had several students from all around the US and one from Denmark, so even if you’re not based in the SF Bay area, we hope you’ll make it.

Here in the US, we’ve got the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow which is traditionally a day in which we give thanks for all the nice things in our lives and eat a big turkey dinner with family and friends. I don’t have any turkey to give out, but I do think thanks are in order to our Caucho community.

Thanks to all of our users and customers who are using Resin, Quercus, BAM, and/or Hessian. Thank you to all the people who participate in our blogs, mailing lists, and forums. We really appreciate those of you who take the time to file bugs on our bug tracker. I’d like to give a special thanks to those of you who attended the first Caucho training session in October — you’re brave souls who gave lots of great feedback to make the course even better. Finally, thanks to all the people who have attended talks I’ve given over the past year.

Speaking of which… my next talk is going to be at Devoxx about Quercus. I’ll be showing a demo of how to improve the performance of PHP applications by profiling the compiled Java code. If you’re going to be at Devoxx, please stop by the talk or the Caucho booth. We’ve also got a really nice announcement to make about the success of a customer using Quercus and Resin in a very big way. It’s a household name that we’re just waiting on clearance to talk about. With any luck, I’ll be able to discuss their case at Devoxx, but if not, I’ll be sure to post details here when we’re allowed.

Thanks again to our Caucho community and happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll be giving a talk on Quercus at Devoxx next month and I’d like to get some idea of who’s using Quercus and for what. If you’re using Quercus, please fill out the quick survey below. Feel free to respond
to this post or directly to me. If you’re not using Quercus, but you want to, please let me know what’s keeping you from using it.

1. What application or applications are you using on Quercus? What are you using them for?

2. Did you use this application before with the C version of PHP? If so, why did you switch? Have you seen a performance/stability improvement?

3. Have you integrated Java and PHP in any way? (e.g. calling Java libraries from PHP or calling PHP from Java using javax.script)

4. What was your experience in installing a PHP app on Quercus?

5. Has your company/team’s organization changed because of using Quercus? For example, have you been able to hire PHP talent for a previously Java-only site?

6. Are you using Quercus with Resin Pro? Resin Open Source? another app server/servlet engine?

Feel free to promote your Quercus-based site - I’d like to see it in action!

You might have noticed that posts slowed down here after my talk at JavaZone, which is because I took some time off to see Scandinavia. But I’m back now and getting ready for even more upcoming events! Just a quick review:

1. San Francisco Java Meetup - I’ll be speaking here again, this time about Resin’s OSGi container implementation, as well as general OSGi issues along with fellow Java Meetup regular, Andrew Headrick. This is just one week away on Monday, Oct 6 at 6:30. The signups are full right now, but keep an eye on the page in case anyone drops out…
2. Resin Administration Training - There are still a couple of spots left for this course, so sign up ASAP to guarantee your seat. I’ll be teaching this at Marakana’s facility in San Francisco on October 22-24. It should be an action packed 3 days!
3. Silicon Valley Code Camp - This informal, but highly technical conference is growing by leaps and bounds. With already over 500 signups, I expect the Code Camp to be a ton of fun and very successful. I’ll be speaking on Quercus and BAM, so stop by for those and the other speakers’ talks on Nov 8 & 9 at Foothill College.
4. Devoxx - You might know this as JavaPolis or briefly JaVoxx, but the newly renamed Devoxx is still the same great conference that attracts developers from all over the world. It will be held Dec 8-12 in Antwerp, Belgium. I’ll be giving a talk there and Caucho is a plugin partner, so look for us on the convention floor as well.